Longing

“Sentience is not an attribute of a body in isolation: it emerges from the ongoing encounter between our flesh and the forest of rhythms in which it finds itself, born of the interplay and tension between the world’s wild hunger and our own.”

David Abram

What do you long for? What does your body long for? Are these two different things?

There’s something striking about the shape-shifting nature of desire, and how what we think we desire sometimes turns out to be not so.

A friend described this once as “cravings masquerading as desire”.

The word ‘crave’ has a more grasping quality to it, and seems to hint more at what we think we might want, whereas actual desire seems to come from a deeper place. Another way of saying that might be: craving is what our mind says we want, while desire is what our body says we want

The word ‘crave’ also seems to imply a movement inwards, a curling up in defense against the world. I get the image of a prisoner huddled over their gruel, with one hand spooning the food in and the other curled around the bowl to make sure nobody gets at it.

Desires Stretching Us Out

I’ve also been thinking about another term we use for desire: ‘longing’, and how it has an alternate physical sense to it, that of lengthening, and how our physical response to desire is to reach out to what we long for, almost like a stretch, lengthening our selves in order to get what we want.

The idea of our desires stretching us out–changing our shape–highlights a different gift our desires give us. That of drawing us out of the mental world we construct for ourselves and into a more real world, one that calls us to engage with it and connect.

And as our desires urge us to reach and lengthen, we become more spacious and less closed in, more awake and responsive to the world around us. We touch the world and allow the world to touch us. Maybe the longing that draws us out is also a key element of our aliveness, and necessary for us to feel the fact of our belonging to the world.

Sitting here in my office chair (I’m noticing how I’m all bent at the middle) tapping away on my keyboard, it’s easy to focus on my own smaller wants and forget that I am a being made for interacting in a world with it’s own wild hungers.

Your desires are what call you back to the wild and hungry world that wants your body to interact with it. Asking you to take part in the push and pull of self and world, as we all trade longings in order to stretch and shape each other.

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Hi, my name is Dave Rowley. I like oceans, digging my fingers in the dirt, and any kind of pastry when it's filled with apples or pears. Presence is my passion, and I love helping other people be more fully present in their lives.

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About Me

Hi, I'm Dave Rowley.
I'm a life coach and believe that sustainable change only happens through being truly present for ourselves. I love helping other people become more present in their lives. I also love hanging out with trees. And oceans. And pastries filled with pears.

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